Trilight Zone

[tricore]

In many ways, LinuxWorld 2002 was the ultimate bad blind date.

Big business was briefly paired with hackers at the expo. The business folks got all excited and talked about long-term committed relationships, but the hackers were bored out of their minds.

Many long-term LinuxWorld attendees said they thought the corporate presence at this year's show was both overwhelming and uninspiring, and they felt that the expo had lost its hacker heart.

"Be careful what you wish for," programmer Mickey Haines said. "Five years ago, we all wished that Linux would be accepted by the business world. Our wish was granted. But the payback is a plague of pink-faced guys in shiny blue suits. The expo is all about brains and business now, not art and heart like it used to be."

But if it hadn't been for those big-business big booths, the convention could have been held in a tiny Manhattan hotel room.

Even with the mega-exhibits from major tech vendors, huge sections of the exhibit floor were shrouded with curtains to hide the empty spaces. Workshops and keynote speeches, with the exception of the Golden Penguin Bowl, also failed to draw more than a handful of folks.

The exhibitors seemed to be very happy, though. Most said that the people who came were there to purchase something, not just to lurk and drool over the million-dollar mainframes.

Most of the booths featured heavy-duty hardware and "Enterprise Solutions" -- which are fine and dandy, but quickly get incredibly boring if you don't happen to be an enterprise.

An announcement that Linux was in the running to power Project Purple, soon to be the world's most powerful computer, was greeted with cheers. Project Purple will pool the computing resources of the Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia labs.

Also notable was Hewlett-Packard's announcement that more high-end graphics tools were on the way for Linux, sparked by DreamWorks Studio's use of Linux-based HP machines to create animated films such as Shrek and the upcoming Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron. Linux has a serious lack of pro-level graphics and design apps.

But since there was little in the way of actual products to play with, after a fast cruise around the floor most people tended to wander around in small circles desperately seeking diversions.

Compaq's booth was fun. Once past their cheesy Dave-the-LinuxMan-hosted game show, visitors could flop down into a beanbag chair and play video games.

IBM was a cool sophisticated presence, relying on the lure of its muscular new mainframes to draw the crowds.

Many people wondered why Apple didn't have a booth, especially since Mac OSX is partly open-sourced. Some OSX developers had hoped Apple would exhibit at LinuxWorld to show that the company was interested in the entire open source movement, not just Apple's own OS projects.

A few Apple representatives did attend the show, and said Apple was serious about open source development, but the company has had to cut back on displaying at all tradeshows over the past couple of years.

The most-talked about new product was definitely Linux for Playstation2 by Sony, a development kit that lets programmers transform their PlayStation2 consoles into desktop computers. A website with details on Linux Playstation development and programming notes went live shortly after the announcement.